You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
- English proverb

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.
- Mark Twain

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

For the record, I’ve never owned a horse.

I’ve ridden a few, but I still don’t know for sure if this proverb is true.

Although I suspect when John Heywood used the phrase in 1546 he was talking more about people than horses.

You think?

As for Mark Twain’s quote, I agree 100 percent.

My humble sympathies go out to the citizens of the world, the country and the Gulf Coast today, however. I’ve lived on the coast of Alabama and loved it, and in New Orleans, and I feel you. I do.

But I know how hard it is sometimes to actually spend time reading up on a subject before bloviating about it.

It is the easiest thing in the world for a human being to do. Just spout an opinion off the top of your head without a clue what in the hell you are talking about.

It happens all the time on TeeVee and on Facebook, which is just one of the annoying little things about the new technology.

Don’t get me started on the other things. I know people love their Facebook, just like they love their gas guzzling SUVs, their freezing cold air conditioning and their greasy hamburgers.

One hundred years ago, in celebration of the moron — which seemed to have an advantage over the egg heads of the day — Mark Twain also said this: “All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.”

Just ask Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. Especially Rush Limbaugh.

He has made more American dollars spouting ignorance on the radio than any intelligent literary publication in the history of the world.

What are we to make of this?

Is ignorance really bliss?

Or should we use the full quote: “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.”

Can you say Alabamaland?

Just try using the word “sociology” on Paul Finebaum’s radio show and see how fast they switch to a commercial for truck tires.

I know, because I tried it once.

I also tried to bring up the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, but that went down like cold okra.

Now if I had brought up the Second Amendment, we could have had a lively debate all afternoon.

Just last night, I stumbled into a conversation I never planned to have with a sick musician who wanted to complain to me about bullets flying in his yard. These alleged bullets were coming supposedly from black youths who recently moved into the neighborhood.

But when I said, “Hey, I guess they were just practicing their Second Amendment rights too,” and laughed, I was subjected to the most horrendous diatribe you can imagine, a dialogue right off the Bill O’Reilly show. Even though there is no evidence on the Web to back it up, there is an old e-mail that still gets passed around over the right-wing Internets on how some country in the Netherlands or somewhere actually REQUIRES everyone to own a gun, and I’ll be damned. They have NO crime!

Imagine that. I imagine they have no black people there either, so maybe all the skin heads and the Ku Klux Klan should just go ahead and move there today. Love it or leave it was their slogan in the ’60s, wasn’t it? Limbaugh said he would leave the country if Obama was elected and Congress passed a health care bill. Wonder why he’s still here?

This diatribe was from someone who wanted me to listen to his problem about bullets flying through his yard.

There is no talking sense to people like that, so I hung up the phone.

I am also not interested in spending my time arguing with people on Facebook who think there is no difference between President Barack Obama and president want-a-be Sarah Palin.

So let me just say right here what I think about this subject, so I can just link to this story everytime it comes up. I can’t give people who don’t believe in government or taxes a free university education every day in Facebook or blog comments.

But just maybe if you would get yourself down to the water and drink now and then, that is to say actually read something on the subject you are interested in, perhaps we would not have to engage in these debates over and over and over again.

Here it is. Are you ready?

Politics matters. The party in power matters. There is a big difference between Democrats and Republicans on a host of policy issues.

Yes, both parties have been corrupted by the influence of corporate and other special interest money that funds political campaigns.

There is only one sure-fire way of changing this, and we’ve known it for years. But as long as it is debated on cable television by the bloviators as if both sides have equal value, nothing will ever get done.

Here’s the solution. Are you ready?

It’s actually quite simple.

Public financing of elections.

We already have a version of it on U.S. tax forms, but there’s not a Tea Partier in the country who will check the box to give one dollar to publicly finance presidential elections, because they are so stupid they like having oil companies, insurance companies, drug companies and the National Rifle Association decide who the next president will be.

As for the people of the Gulf Coast, we all feel your pain and we have no doubt the government has not done enough to help you fast enough.

But if you will think back to 2004 and 2000, or for that matter 1980, 1984, and 1988, then ask yourself what kind of government you voted for then, perhaps you will constrain your screams against the first black president in U.S. history who has not come down there and paid your bills for you and saved you from BP’s oil in your water and air.

It wasn’t five months ago that the Tea Party was all over cable TV and the Internets claiming our non-U.S. citizen president, who was born in Kenya (not Hawaii), was a Muslim (not Christian), was going to go all over the country to pay every poor black person’s bills for them. That was his sinister plan against white people. I’ve seen the e-mails. You can’t deny it.

I guess they now see that Obama’s plan was not to pay anybody’s bills for them. Although he did seize $20 billion of BP’s oil money to see that those who legitimately lost money get paid back before BP declares bankruptcy and merges with ExxonMoblie to form the largest multi-national corporation in the world and pays taxes to no government.

Who do you think will be in charge of access to your beaches then? A private contractor paid for by ExxonMobleBP, that’s who. It won’t be Obama’s fault, or even Sarah Palin’s if she manages to get elected in 2012.

If you want the Unites States government to have ANY authority in crisis situations like the oil spill, you better start voting for more government oversight and regulation, not less.

Or at the very least, if you want to be so self-sufficient and live without the horrendous burden of taxes, maybe you should just get yourself in a skiff and go out there and clean up that oil all by yourself. See how fast you get sick from it. Maybe that will make you drink, and read, and think.

If not, there’s no hope for this place we call the United States of America. We may as well get in lock-step with the end of the world Bible thumpers and go ahead and break out the nukes and blow this world up for good. Maybe we should just bring on the end of the world as we know it and wipe out the human race.

The roaches and the ants will survive. Maybe they will take better care of this place.

Tags: A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read, You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 22nd, 2010 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Alabama's Gulf Coast, Big Oil, BP Oil Spill, Connecting the Dots, Environment News, Glynn Wilson, LocustFork.Net, Making Democracy Work, President Barack Obama, The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.